*Haven't seen this yet, but it looks good. -Vmann
*
http://tracker.conspiracycentral.net/torrents-details.php?id=1777
*The Century Of The Self - Part 1of4*
Happiness Machines
The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American
nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the public relations profession
in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud's ideas to
manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations how they could
make people want things they didn't need by systematically linking
mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires.
Bernays was one of the main architects of the modern techniques of
mass-consumer persuasion, using every trick in the book, from celebrity
endorsement and outrageous PR stunts, to eroticising the motorcar.
His most notorious coup was breaking the taboo on women smoking by
persuading them that cigarettes were a symbol of independence and
freedom. But Bernays was convinced that this was more than just a way of
selling consumer goods. It was a new political idea of how to control
the masses. By satisfying the inner irrational desires that his uncle
had identified, people could be made happy and thus docile.
It was the start of the all-consuming self which has come to dominate
today's world.
http://tracker.conspiracycentral.net/torrents-details.php?id=1778
*The Century Of The Self - Part 2of4*
The Engineering of Consent
The programme explores how those in power in post-war America used
Freud's ideas about the unconscious mind to try and control the masses.
Politicians and planners came to believe Freud's underlying premise -
that deep within all human beings were dangerous and irrational desires
and fears. They were convinced that it was the unleashing of these
instincts that had led to the barbarism of Nazi Germany. To stop it ever
happening again they set out to find ways to control this hidden enemy
within the human mind.
Sigmund Freud's daughter, Anna, and his nephew, Edward Bernays, provided
the centrepiece philosophy. The US government, big business, and the CIA
used their ideas to develop techniques to manage and control the minds
of the American people. But this was not a cynical exercise in
manipulation. Those in power believed that the only way to make
democracy work and create a stable society was to repress the savage
barbarism that lurked just under the surface of normal American life.
http://tracker.conspiracycentral.net/torrents-details.php?id=1779
*The Century Of The Self - Part 3of4*
There is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads: He Must Be Destroyed
In the 1960s, a radical group of psychotherapists challenged the
influence of Freudian ideas in America. They were inspired by the ideas
of Wilhelm Reich, a pupil of Freud's, who had turned against him and was
hated by the Freud family. He believed that the inner self did not need
to be repressed and controlled. It should be encouraged to express itself.
Out of this came a political movement that sought to create new beings
free of the psychological conformity that had been implanted in people's
minds by business and politics.
This programme shows how this rapidly developed in America through
self-help movements like Werber Erhard's Erhard Seminar Training - into
the irresistible rise of the expressive self: the Me Generation.
But the American corporations soon realised that this new self was not a
threat but their greatest opportunity. It was in their interest to
encourage people to feel they were unique individuals and then sell them
ways to express that individuality. To do this they turned to techniques
developed by Freudian psychoanalysts to read the inner desires of the
new self.
http://tracker.conspiracycentral.net/torrents-details.php?id=1780
*The Century Of The Self - Part 4of4*
Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering
This episode explains how politicians on the left, in both Britain and
America, turned to the techniques developed by business to read and
fulfil the inner desires of the self.
Both New Labour, under Tony Blair, and the Democrats, led by Bill
Clinton, used the focus group, which had been invented by
psychoanalysts, in order to regain power. They set out to mould their
policies to people's inner desires and feelings, just as capitalism had
learnt to do with products.
Out of this grew a new culture of public relations and marketing in
politics, business and journalism. One of its stars in Britain was
Matthew Freud who followed in the footsteps of his relation, Edward
Bernays, the inventor of public relations in the 1920s.
The politicians believed they were creating a new and better form of
democracy, one that truly responded to the inner feelings of individual.
But what they didn't realise was that the aim of those who had
originally created these techniques had not been to liberate the people
but to develop a new way of controlling them.